When I was a kid, Key Markets’ car park was the venue for all sorts of dark dealings and (as AC/DC would put it) dirty deeds done dirt cheap, whether real or imagined. If there was a story going round school that someone had been stabbed, overdosed on smack (which was a hot topic in the classrooms and corridors due to that Zammo off Grange Hill) or been arrested for sniffing glue, it was almost certain to have happened “in Key Markets car park”.

The day didn’t start well. A blocked drain, forgetting the keys to work and having to go back and fetch them and then a slip on rainy plastic, a mid-air semi-cartwheel (“semi-cartwheeled headfirst in the rain,” as Edward Ka-Spel would say) into the side of a skip and a resultant injury resembling nothing so much as the remnants of a failed scalping all combined to make it the sort of day when there’s nothing really for it but to go and see Sleaford Mods. Fortunately, the day ended with me going to see Sleaford Mods, so it all turned out nice in the end.

It’s an early show, presumably so the Electric Ballroom can be cleared out in time for whatever passes for a club night in bloody Camden these days, which means that when I’d normally be settling down with a gin and tonic and

At the start of Lautréamont’s Maldoror, the disclaimer suggests: “This is not for you” and this is where I find myself with Sleaford Mods. I like this album, find it witty and funny and I’ve always liked The Fall and it’s not as annoying as Renegade Soundwave but… this isn’t for me. I feel wrong listening to it, feel like I’m inevitably going to like it in the wrong way. Now, I’m not about to suggest that you have to be there (and be in there) to get Sleaford Mods – this is a work of art, after all, and requires imagination, a certain amount of retroscending – but there’s something about all their releases (I joined with most of the rest of

Sleaford Mods, Nottingham’s self-styled purveyors of “electronic munt minimalist punk-hop for the working classes and under,” are back with Divide And Exit, the follow-up to their cult classic compilation Austerity Dogs; so brace for anger, scatology, moshing and swearing. If they were a publication they’d be a cross between Class War and Viz, but they’re not. They’re a band. And they’re fucking excellent. Frontman Jason Williamson comes on like a Black Country John Cooper Clarke, delivery and flow pitched somewhere between Mike Skinner and Mark E Smith, with none of the cheese of the former but all the bile of the latter. Against a stunningly lo-fi, low-rent backdrop Wiliamson spits rhymes, rants and rage into the face of an

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"The English Heretic project has been consistently putting out strange and beautiful collections for a while now and this release comes with an OZ-style booklet, lurid and bloody and filled with ephemera..." https://t.co/EHK6vpWzZc